I just got back from a 4 day trip to Brazil and back to attend BrazilJS. I was humbled and very happy to give the opening keynote seeing that the closing was meant to be by Brendan Eich and Andreas Gal – so, no pressure.

The keynote

In my keynote, I asked for more harmony in our community, and more ownership of the future of JavaScript by those who use it in production.

For quite some while now, I am confused as to who we are serving as browser makers, standards writers and library creators. All of the excellent solutions we have seem to fall through the cracks somewhere when you see what goes live.

That’s why I wanted to remind the audience that whatever amazing, inspiring and clever thing they’ll hear about at the conference is theirs to take to fruition. We have too much frustration in our market, and too much trying to one-up one another instead of trying to solve problems and making the solutions easily and readily available. The slides are on Slideshare, and a video will become available soon.

About Brazil

There are a few things to remember when you are going to Brazil:

• When people are excited about something, they are really excited about it. There’s a lot of passion.
• Personal space is as rare as an affordable flat in central London – people will affectionately touch strangers and there is a lot of body language. If that’s not your thing, make it obvious!
• You will eat your body weight in amazing meat and food is a social gathering, not just fuel. Thus, bring some time.
• Everybody will apologise for their bad English before having a perfectly comprehensible conversation with you
• People of all ages and backgrounds are into heavy music (rock, metal, hardcore…)

About the event

BrazilJS was a ridiculous attempt at creating the biggest JavaScript event with 1,300 people. And it was a 100% success at that. I am fascinated by the professionalism, the venue, the AV setup and all the things that were done for speakers and attendees alike. Here are just a few things that happened:

• There was a very strong message about diversity and a sensible and enforced code of conduct. This should not be a surprise, but when you consider Brazilian culture and reputation (think Carnival) it takes pride and conviction in those matters to stand up for them the way the organisers did.
• The AV setup was huge and worked fine. There were no glitches in the audio and every presentation was live translated from English to Brazilian Portuguese and vice versa. The translation crew did a great job and we as presenters should do more to support them. I will write a post soon about this.
• Wireless was flaky, but available when you needed it. It is pretty ridiculous to assume in a country where connectivity isn’t cheap and over a thousand people with two devices each try to connect that you’d have a good connection. As a presenter, I never rely on availability – neither should you.
• There was always enough coffee, snacks and even a huge cake celebrating JavaScript (made by the mom of one of the organisers – the cake, not JavaScript)
• The overall theme was geek – as geek as it can get. The organisers dressed up as power rangers, in between talks we saw animated 90s TV series, there as a Virtual Reality ride covering the history of JavaScript built with Arduinos and there were old-school arcade machines and consoles to play with.
• It was a single track conference over two days with lots of high-class speakers and very interesting topics.
• As a speaker, everything was organised for me. We all took a hired bus from and to the venue and we had lunch catered for us.
• The conference also had a minority/diversity scholarship program where people who couldn’t afford to come got a sponsored ticket. These people weren’t grandstanded or shown up but just became a part of the crowd. I was lucky to chat to a few and learned quite a few things.
• The after party was a big “foot in mouth” moment for me as I kept speaking out against bands at those. However, in Brazil and choosing a band that covers lots of rock anthems, it very much worked. I never thought I see an inclusive, non-aggressive mosh pit and people stage diving at a JavaScript event – I was wrong.

So, all I can say is thank you to everyone involved. This was a conference to remember and the enthusiasm of the people I met and talked to is a testament to how much this worked!

Personal/professional notes

BrazilJS was an interesting opportunity for me as I wanted to connect with my Microsoft colleagues in the country. I was amazed by how well-organised our participation was and loved the enthusiasm people had for us. Even when one of our other speakers couldn’t show up, we simply ran an impromptu Q&A on stage abut Edge. Instead of a sales booth we had technical evangelists at hand, who also helped translating. Quite a few people came to the booth to fix their web sites for Microsoft Edge’s standard compliant rendering. It’s fun to see when fixing things yields quick results.

Other short impressions:

• I had no idea what a machine my colleague Jonathan Sampson is on stage. His talk in adventurous Portuguese had the audience in stitches and I was amazed by the well-structured content. I will pester him to re-record this in English.
• Ju Gonçalves (@cyberglot) gave a great, detailed talk about reduce(). If you are a conference organiser, check her out as a new Speaker() option – she is now based in Copenhagen.
• It was fun to catch up with Laurie Voss after a few years (we worked in Yahoo together) and it was great of him to point to his LGBTQ Slack group inviting people to learn more about that facet of diversity in our community.
• It warmed me to see the Mozilla Brazil community still kicking butt. Warm, affectionate and knowledgable people like the ones you could meet at the booth there are the reason why I became a Mozillian in the first place.

And that’s that

Thank you for everyone involved. Thank you to everybody asking me lots of technical questions and giving non-filtered feedback. Thank you for showing that a lot of geeks can also be very human and warm. Thank you for embracing someone who doesn’t speak your language. I met quite a few people I need to follow up with and I even had a BBQ at the family of two of the attendees I met before I went to my plane back home. You rock!

I just released an article over on Sitepoint called The ES6 conundrum. In it, I am discussing the current issues we’re facing with using ES6:

• We can’t use it safely in the wild – as ES6 is a syntax change to the language, legacy browsers will see it as a JavaScript error and give our end users a broken experience. This violates the Priority of Constituencies design principle of HTML5
• We can use TypeScript or transpile it – which means we don’t debug the code we write but generated code. This can also lead to a lot of code bloat.
• We can feature test for it – which that can get complex quickly and we can’t assume that support for one features means others are supported
• Browser support for ES6 only makes a difference internally – as we transpile, we never send any ES6 to the browser
• The performance of ES6 is bad right now which is normal, as we have no way to tweak and test it in the browser and it offers much more complexity than ES5

All in all, we need to have a good think about ES6, and – to me – it feels we are at a turning point in web development. I will talk in more detail about this in my BrazilJS keynote in two weeks.

Read “The ES6 conundrum” on Sitepoint

I just flew from San Francisco to Seattle still suffering from the aftermath of the after party of Open Web Camp 7, a gathering of enthusiasts of the web that lasted for seven years and showed that you can teach, inspire and meet without having to pay a lot. The ticket prices were $10 and even those were mostly to avoid people getting tickets and not coming. All the money left over was then donated to a great cause. Thank you for everyone involved, especially John Foliot for seven years of following a dream and succeeding. And also for moving on whilst you are still happy with what you do.

My presentation at the event, “Erase and rewind – a tale of innovation and impatience” discussed the problems I found with advocating for the open web I encountered over the years. The problems we found, the gaps I see in our storytelling and the loss of focus we suffered when smartphones became a new form factor that seemed great for the web, but became its biggest problem very soon.

There’s a screencast of the presentation on YouTube

The slides are available on Slideshare

I got a bit into a rant, but I think there is a big problem that the people who advocate about great ideas of the web clash with those who want to innovate it. There are a lot of events going on right now that want to achieve the same goal, but keep violating the best practices of others. We need to rally to keep the web relevant and alive. Not define that what we do is the one true way.

Here’s the thing: Twitter sucks for arguments:

• It is almost impossible to follow conversation threads
• People favouriting quite agressive tweets leaves you puzzled as to the reasons
• People retweeting parts of the conversation out of context leads to wrong messages and questionable quotes
• 140 characters are great to throw out truisms but not to make a point.
• People consistenly copying you in on their arguments floods your notifications tab without really wanting to weigh in any longer

This morning was a great example: Peter Paul Koch wrote yet another incendiary post asking for a one year hiatus of browser innovation. I tweeted about the post saying it has some good points. Paul Kinlan of the Chrome team disagreed strongly with the post. I opted to agree with some of it, as a lot of features we created and thought we discarded tend to linger longer on the web than we want to.

A few of those back and forth conversations later and Alex Russel dropped the mic:

@Paul_Kinlan: good news is that @ppk has articulated clearly how attractive failure can be. @codepo8 seems to agree. Now we can call it out.

Now, I am annoyed about that. It is accusing, calling me reactive and calls out criticism of innovation a failure. It also very aggressively hints that Alex will now always quote that to show that PPK was wrong and keeps us from evolving. Maybe. Probably. Who knows, as it is only 140 characters. But I am keeping my mouth shut, as there is no point at this agressive back and forth. It results in a lot of rushed arguments that can and will be quoted out of context. It results in assumed sub-context that can break good relationships. It – in essence – is not helpful.

If you truly disagree with something – make your point. Write a post, based on research and analysis. Don’t throw out a blanket approval or disapproval of the work of other people to spark a “conversation” that isn’t one.

Well-written thoughts lead to better quotes and deeper understanding. It takes more effort to read a whole post than to quote a tweet and add your sass.

In many cases, whilst writing the post you realise that you really don’t agree or disagree as much as you thought you did with the author. This leads to much less drama and more information.

And boy do we need more of that and less drama. We are blessed with jobs where people allow us to talk publicly, research and innovate and to question the current state. We should celebrate that and not use it for pithy bickering and trench fights.

Photo Credit: acidpix

I present at conferences – a lot. I also moderate conferences and I brought the concept of interviews instead of Q&A to a few of them (originally this concept has to be attributed to Alan White for Highland Fling, just to set the record straight). Many conferences do this now, with high-class ones like SmashingConf and Fronteers being the torch-bearers. Other great conferences, like EdgeConf, are 100% Q&A, and that’s great, too.

I also watch a lot of conference talks – to learn things, to see who is a great presenter (and I will recommend to conference organisers who ask me for talent), and to see what others are doing to excite audiences. I do that live, but I’m also a great fan of talk recordings.

I want to thank all conference organisers who go the extra mile to offer recordings of the talks at their event – you already rock, thanks!

I put those on my iPod and watch them in the gym, whilst I am on the cross trainer. This is a great time to concentrate, and to get fit whilst learning things. It is a win-win.

Much like everyone else, I pick the talk by topic, but also by length. Half an hour to 40 minutes is what I like best. I also tend to watch 2-3 15 minute talks in a row at times. I am quite sure, I am not alone in this. Many people watch talks when they commute on trains or in similar “drive by educational” ways. That’s why I’d love conference organisers to consider this use case more.

I know, I’m spoilt, and it takes a lot of time and effort and money to record, edit and release conference videos and you make no money from it. But before shooting me down and telling me I have no right to demand this if I don’t organise events myself, let me tell you that I am pretty sure you can stand out if you do just a bit of extra work to your recordings:

• Make them available offline (for YouTube videos I use YouTube DL on the command line to do that anyways). Vimeo has an option for that, and Channel 9 did that for years, too.
• Edit out the Q&A – there is nothing more annoying than seeing a confused presenter on a small screen trying to understand a question from the audience for a minute and then saying “yes”. Most of the time Q&A is not 100% related to the topic of the talk, and wanders astray or becomes dependent on knowledge of the other talks at that conference. This is great for the live audience, but for the after-the-fact consumer it becomes very confusing and pretty much a waste of time.

That way you end up with much shorter videos that are much more relevant. I am pretty sure your viewing/download numbers will go up the less cruft you have.

It also means better Q&A for your event:

• presenters at your event know they can deliver a great, timed talk and go wild in the Q&A answering questions they may not want recorded.
• people at the event can ask questions they may not want recorded (technically you’d have to ask them if it is OK)
• the interviewer or people at the event can reference other things that happened at the event without confusing the video audience. This makes it a more lively Q&A and part of the whole conference experience
• there is less of a rush to get the mic to the person asking and there is more time to ask for more details, should there be some misunderstanding
• presenters are less worried about being misquoted months later when the video is still on the web but the context is missing

For presenters, there are a few things to consider when presenting for the audience and for the video recording, but that’s another post. So, please, consider a separation of talk and Q&A – I’d be happier and promote the hell out of your videos.